搭建人文关怀的社会平台--从公众需求看大众传媒作为公共空间

公共空间是随着现代公民社会的产生而出现的,是现代化的产物,是社会进步的表征。与作为党和政府的"喉舌"不同,大众传媒作为公共空间,能彻底改变过去那种事实上的单向传播(灌输)模式,使双向对称传播(互动)得以落实,从而真正成为公民与政府、政权政治与政权外政治联系的桥梁与纽带,即通过体恤民众,满足民众的精神诉求,培养民众作为现代人应具备的自主意识和责任意识,在沟通协调中促进政府与公民相互间的了解、理解和信任,争取公民对政府的自愿合作与对政治的自觉认同,在社会上树立起公共精神品格,使自身成为引导民众、促进民主的"文化场"。大众传媒作为公共空间既有利于建设社会主义民主政治,又有利于我国社会主义精神文明的建设与发展:大众传媒作为公共空间更为关注人本身,更有利于满足人们的交往需求、尊重需求与认同需求;大众传媒作为公共空间着眼于让公众舆论发出自己真实的声音,更有利于满足公众政治参与的需求;大众传媒作为公共空间更为关注人的生存与处境,更有利于公众缓释精神压力,增强社会联系。     

论乌托邦精神的价值诉求——兼评西方马克思主义者布洛赫的乌托邦思想

面对着20世纪上半叶西方世界的文化危机,即人的物化和异化、技术世界对人类的驾驭与奴役、价值理性被工具理性所消解、科学世界的膨胀与生活世界的消逝等等,以此为文化背景,唤醒人内在的超越的和批判的本性,即乌托邦的精神,扬弃和超越以物化和异化为特征的文化——历史困境,从而实现人的自我解放,使人真正成为历史进程创造性的主体,这即是笔者所要达到的哲学主题。     

论资产阶级人道主义的历史局限性

通过文艺复兴运动、启蒙运动和费尔巴哈的人本学,资产阶级人道主义展现为一个动态的发展过程,其间贯穿着共同的精神内涵,这就是对人性和人的价值的高度肯定。资产阶级人道主义在历史上曾经发挥过积极作用,但也有不可避免的历史局限性,其整个理论都是建立在抽象人性论的基础之上的,是资产阶级的利益和要求在意识形态领域的反映,并且具有一定的欺骗性。     

民间智慧的影像表达——《金牌冰人》与中国机智人物故事

民间叙事对今日影视作品的表达有着深刻的影响。以香港电视剧《金牌冰人》为例,从难题的设置与人物形象塑造两方面的探讨可以分析出传统机智人物故事对影视作品的影响。     

The gendered experiences of local volunteers in conflicts and emergencies

ABSTRACT

This article explores the gendered experiences of local volunteers operating in conflicts and emergencies. Despite decades of progress to integrate gender issues into development and humanitarian research, policy, and practice, the gendered dynamics of volunteering are still little understood. To redress this, this article draws on data collected as part of the Volunteers in Conflicts and Emergencies (ViCE) Initiative, a collaboration between the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement led by the Swedish Red Cross, and the Centre for International Development at Northumbria University. Contributing original empirical findings on the intersection of gender, volunteering, and emergencies, this article offers new ways of thinking about how gender equality and women’s empowerment can be advanced in humanitarian crises, as seen through the experiences of local volunteers.     

Narrative stability in interview accounts

We identify and discuss the phenomenon of narrative stability, in the context of current methodological literature on interviewing. It derives from two independent studies, undertaken fifteen years apart, of members of the same genetics research group who were interviewed by different researchers. The first (‘Discovery’) interviews were collected very soon after the breakthrough was first published. The second (‘Legacy’) interviews were based on informants looking back at those events. Some strikingly similar narrative episodes across those accounts suggest strong narrative stability. In the course of interviews, informants reproduce biographical stories that are well sedimented. Not all interview materials, therefore, should be thought of exclusively in terms of co-production between interviewer and informant.     

Problem Formulation and Solution Mechanisms: A Behavioral Study of Humanitarian Transportation Planning

When dealing with urgent, ill‐defined problems, such as rapidly evolving emergency situations, operations managers have little time for problem formulation or solution. While the mechanisms by which humans formulate and solve problems have been described, mechanisms for rapid, concurrent formulating and solving are not well understood. This study investigates these mechanisms through a field study of transportation planning in a humanitarian response setting. The findings show that the problem is solved through greedy search and formulated through sensemaking, in which search enables updates to an evolving problem formulation, and the formulation directs and limits the search process. This study explores the implications of these findings for the development of better problem formulation processes and problem‐solving strategies for urgent and ill‐defined operations management problems.     

Telling a modest story: accounts of men's upward mobility from the National Child Development Study

While the pattern of social mobility in postwar Britain has been extensively studied, revealing considerable upward mobility, much less is known about the subjective dimension to mobility. In this article, we employ a new sample of in-depth interviews with 50-year old men from the National Child Development Study to examine in detail the link between objective mobility patterns and the way the upwardly mobile narrate their life trajectories. In contrast to the mobility ideology suggested by the Oxford mobility survey of the early 1970s, in which the upwardly mobile recognized and internalized their success as a project of the self, we report how members of this later generation of men with highly successful careers prefer instead to articulate 'modest' life stories. By treating the career as a narrative device, we are able to show how the disavowal of the dominant, linear hierarchical career model by these men allows them to tell particular and distinctive stories which establish their individuality and personhood, while, paradoxically, recognizing the cultural power of the dominant model. In particular, we highlight the use of 'linear contingent' narratives by these men, in which specific events, especially those connected with occupational and geographical transitions, are deployed as contingent thresholds to mark out key shifts and passages in their lives. We then compare their accounts with those of immobile and downwardly men, who instead deploy 'ghostly' stories, preoccupied by the past, or defensive accounts, displaying unease with their failure to live up to the expectations of the linear career model. Having shown that men's accounts of mobility are suffused with an awareness of their need to establish their own individuality through repudiating the social trope of the instrumental careerist, we conclude that the links between career identities and objective mobility patterns are not straightforward and need careful unravelling.     

Vehicle Procurement Policy for Humanitarian Development Programs

This article aims to identify optimal vehicle procurement policies for organizations engaged in humanitarian development programs and to derive general insights on the characteristics of these policies. Toward that end, we follow an inductive approach. First, we study the operations of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in three representative countries: Sudan, Afghanistan, and Ethiopia. Using a linear programming (LP) model primed with field data provided by the ICRC, we calculate the optimal vehicle fleet size and compare it with the policies actually implemented. Second, drawing from results of the LP model, we develop a stylized quadratic control model and use it to characterize the general structure of the optimal policy under different demand scenarios and operational constraints. After demonstrating that the results of the control model are consistent with those of the LP model in the specific context analyzed, we discuss the optimal policies and the applicability of the former as a practical tool for strategic asset planning.     

Information Diffusion among Agents: Implications for Humanitarian Operations

The basis for this article is an information‐processing view of the UN's cluster approach. We use agent‐based modeling and simulations to show that clusters, if properly utilized, encourage better information flow and thus facilitate effective response to disasters. The article intends to turn the attention of the humanitarian community to the importance of sharing information and the role of cluster leads in facilitating humanitarian aid. Our results indicate that if cluster leads act as information hubs, information reaches its target faster, enabling a prompt humanitarian response. In addition, we show that information quality is critical for effective resource utilization—if cluster leads filter information, it moves faster. We also found evidence that the willingness to exchange information plays a larger role in transmitting information than that of an information hub, particularly during later stages of response operations.